Fly Away
by Dahlia
Summary: A set of 3 vignettes, in which Hermione deals with the aftermath of the War.
1. First

**Disclaimer:** Characters and universe is J.K. Rowling's, and the song, _Fly Away, is by Poe. Yes, I know, I'm a songfic addict. A big thank you to Slythdor & Cassie Blake for beta-ing this little monster for me._

~*~*~*~

_It makes sense that it should happen this way,  
That the sky should break, and the earth should shake,  
As if to say_

_Sure it all matters but in such an unimportant way.  
As if to say  
  
Fly away, sweet bird of prey,  
Fly, fly away.  
Nothing can stand in your way.  
Sweet bird, if you knew the words  
I know you'd say_

_Fly, fly away.  
  
_

~*~

It was over. Through the cheers and celebration, she stared out at the battlefield before her. The ground was churned into mud, from a combination of rain, blood, bile and God-knew what else. From her vantage point, it was difficult to see which corpses had been enemies, and which had been allies.

But a corpse is a corpse (_'of course, of course,' she thought giddily), and there probably weren't sides once you were dead. Just worms._

She collapsed heavily to the ground, and ran dirty fingers through even dirtier hair. It was hard to not start giggling. But at least if she did, everyone would just think it was because Good Had Triumphed! She wrapped her arms around herself and started rocking, back and forth, in the stinking mud.

Her grandfather had been in World War 2, she recalled. As a child, thirsty for knowledge, she had pestered him to tell her about it for a few weeks after her parents had made the mistake of buying her a book on 20th century British history.

Finally, after he had had enough, Papa had retrieved an old snapshot album. He pulled out one photograph – a group of maybe two dozen young men, all in uniform, carrying rifles, and grinning broadly. He pointed himself out, and two others. Then he told her that they were the only ones, of the 20-odd boys in that picture, to survive the war.

She never asked him about WW2 again.

She had had an inkling of the horrors of war then, at that young age, but it was now, when it was spread out in front of her in all its sickening, Technicolor glory, that she knew why Papa hadn't ever wanted to speak about it.

She realised that she was giggling and crying at the same time, then, and still rocking back and forth. She saw no reason to stop just yet, though.

How could they, how could _Dumbledore, have let this happen? It was all so insane, and if the UN knew about the whole Army of Children thing, Hogwarts would be shut down within a week._

She laughed as sobs shook her body, and knew with quiet certainty that she was going mad.

Behind her, the victors, their own hysterical celebrations dying down, slowly began to make their way down to the main battlefield to collect the dead.

~*~

He stood alone as the fighters, many of them children, went to retrieve the bodies of the fallen.

It was madness, all of it. How could this have happened? When did they reach the point of desperation that the Order had seen fit to use children to fight their battles?

He already knew the answer to this, though, and it really wasn't the old man's fault. Voldemort had attacked Hogwarts, and though they had known the attack was coming, there was no real certainty – there had been enough time to contact about four dozen witches and wizards who were loyal to Dumbledore, briefly train the 6th and 7th years, and then…

Then Hell had erupted beside the Quidditch pitch.

He sighed, and started to walk down to help bring the dead into the castle, when he almost tripped over what appeared to be a very muddy, very hysterical Hermione Granger.

He quickly dropped to his knees in front of her and shook her gently. She was almost manic, and he feared that she had lost her mind completely.

"Miss Granger. Miss Granger. _Miss Granger!" he repeated, till she finally hiccoughed and looked at him lucidly._

"Yes, Professor?"

"Are you injured?"  
She shook her head vaguely, and looked around. "No, no. But, the others…"

Snape sighed, and grabbing a hold of her chin, directed her eyes back to his face. "Can you walk?"

"Of course," she said indignantly.

"Good."  
He stood up, and pulled her with him. She teetered for a moment, but regained her balance. She turned away from the carnage, and started picking her way towards the castle. Snape followed close behind, somewhat surprised at her choice of direction – he had rather expected she would, in true Gryffindor fashion, brush herself off, smile grimly, and then march down to help the rest of the survivors begin the momentous task of cleaning up. 

He forgot, sometimes, that she was only 18. She had often struck him as older.

She was moving faster now, dancing ahead of him over the grass, and the black, dramatically-roiling clouds, which Voldemort had summoned in an attempt to attain a suitably sinister atmosphere, had finally disappeared. Washed out sunlight managed to break through, and quickly spread across the castle. 

It made everything, even the girl ahead of him, seem grey.

~*~

"I can't stay here," she said quietly, staring out the window, some hours later. 

He said nothing.

"Nothing makes sense now, and I need…I need to understand."

He could appreciate that – the need to make sense of something, and everything. What was that phrase Muggles used? Once Upon A Time. 

Once upon a time he wanted to understand everything, wanted to take the world apart, take life apart, take feelings and agonies and ecstasies apart and find out what made them all work.

He had tried animals first – poisoning them painlessly, and then, the dissection. They had been, disappointingly, just as lacking in numbered pieces within as they were without. And of course there was no instruction manual.

After that, his undertaking had become somewhat trickier.

But that was all long since past – he had given up on trying to understand anything after his time as a Death Eater. Once one has seen a so-called friend decapitate the corpse of a child and find a wholly new and horrific use for its oesophagus, one stops asking questions flat out.

"I'll come back," she said, pulling him out of one nightmare and into another.

"Why?"

She blinked, and looked at him with the most clarity she had displayed since he first found her on the battlefield. "I just will. I'll want to see the graves."

He nodded, and watched her carefully, trying to determine if she was still sane.

"Will you still be here?" Her voice startled him, and he couldn't think of anything to say, except "Why?"

She looked at him. "Because I think I'd want to see you again."

And she kissed him, a faint brush of her lips against his. When he closed his eyes, her hair brushing against his face felt like feathers.

~*~*~*~


	2. Second

**Disclaimer:** Characters and universe is J.K. Rowling's, and the song, _Fly Away, is by Poe._

~*~*~*~

_It makes sense that it should hurt in this way,  
That my heart should break, and my hands should shake,  
As if to say_

_Sure it don't matter, except in the most important way.  
As if to say  
  
Fly away, sweet bird of prey,  
Fly, fly away.  
I won't stand in your way.  
Sweet bird, if you knew the words  
I know that you'd say_

_Fly, fly away.  
  
_

~*~

She left, and she learned. Learned in much the same way she used to, absorbing knowledge like a sponge, as quickly as possible. History, philosophy, anatomy, psychology, sociology – they were all fair game, and she studied till she understood them all, and could begin, as a detached observer, to apply them all to the War.

Of course, none of her colleagues knew what her real work was, nor did they care. They were Muggles, and university employees at that. The fights over theory (and grants) could get quite vicious, and Hermione kept to herself for the most part. As far as they were concerned, since she had only joined their ranks a year ago and was 3 decades younger than most of them, she wasn't really worth bothering with.

That suited her just fine.

Her office was pristine, with a stack of term papers from her one, graduate-level class. The students seemed to like her, though she already had the reputation of being very tough. Her home, however, was quite the opposite. The small flat was buried in papers, textbooks and a long series of hand-written notebooks, all of which were somehow starting to pull together to form something coherent.

She wasn't sure what her final answer would be – sometimes she wasn't even sure of the question, but she knew that if she used magic, in any way, she'd be cheating. Objectivity was the key, and for objectivity, she had to detach from that world, that life. It would have helped if the nightmares ever stopped.

For a while, when she had first left, owls would sometimes swoop up against the window of her first flat, letters in their claws. She would let them in, provide water and some granola, and then, once they had left, she would burn the letters in a metal wastepaper bin she kept for such purposes. She never opened them. 

After a while, the letters became infrequent and eventually stopped altogether.

Her life continued; day after mundane day at the university, night after sleepless night in her flat.

She was hesitant to venture out into the city, because though London was large, and the chances of seeing someone who would recognise her were slim, it was always a possibility. But sometimes, she couldn't resist the lure of being in the presence of other people. To interact with them was now too intimidating, but to simply sit in a café or walk through a park, surrounded by life and laughter and conversation could do wonders for her nerves.

And so she indulged. Not very often, perhaps five or six times a year and always in the most mundane, Muggle areas she could think of.

It was near the end of her second term of teaching and working that he found her, in Knightsbridge of all places.

~*~

Snape liked Knightsbridge for the exact same reason Hermione felt safe there – the chances of running into another witch or wizard were ridiculously small, a one in a million chance really.

Unfortunately, it's a well-documented fact that one in a million chances crop up nine times out of ten.

And so Snape, walking through the infamous northeast corner of Hyde Park on Saturday afternoon, wondered why the innocuous woman with curly hair seemed so familiar. She was listening to a man rant on about the Prime Minister's personal grooming habits, and he joined the crowd, a few feet away from her. When she turned to leave, he caught a glimpse of her face.

Hermione sodding Granger. Of all people.

While debating what he should do, she noticed him. He caught her eye for a moment, and neither person moved. It was only when she spun around and started off in the opposite direction that he decided he did actually want to speak to her.

He caught up easily, and when she didn't stop or acknowledge the fact that he was walking alongside her, he lightly touched her arm.

She started so violently, Snape almost jumped himself.

"Bugger off," she muttered, before darting off into the crowd again. He followed easily.

"I think not, Miss Granger. You've been gone for seven years, and no one has heard anything from you – not even your family. And you expect me to blithely let you trot off again?"

"Yes," she hissed, looking up at him with fear and anger. The anger he could understand, the fear was a surprise. He watched her impassively.

"I could place a tracing charm on you, you know."

"I know."

"I'm not going to, though, if you talk to me."

She shrugged. "I've never made it a secret where I am – it wouldn't have been very hard to find me, had anyone actually cared enough to look."

Her voice was very bitter, and Snape felt an unexpected surge of guilt. She smiled wryly.

"No. I'm not accusing you. Come on. We can take a taxi."

"Why not just Apparate?" he asked, eyebrow raised.

Hermione shook her head. "No. No magic. You want to talk, we'll do it on my terms."

"All right, Miss Granger."

She led the way to Bayswater Road, and flagged down a cab. They climbed in, and Snape wondered what, exactly, he had gotten himself into.

~*~

He followed her up two flights of narrow stairs and down an even narrower hallway. She stopped suddenly, and he almost ran into her, pulling up at only the last second. She pulled a set of keys out of her jacket pocket and unlocked the door in front of which they had stopped. She pushed open the door, and he stared in amazement at the confusion revealed.

Every available surface, including much of the floor, was covered with stacks of paper and piles of books. He walked in, and immediately picked up a textbook, which was sitting open on the small loveseat.

"Neo-Freudian Theories," he murmured, and continued reading down the page, noting that the heading, 'Anxiety and Coping Strategies' had been highlighted with some sort of yellow ink. He glanced at the cover. A Muggle psychology textbook, focusing on personality.

"I was doing a bit of research," she said quietly, looking around his shoulder at the book.

"About what?"

"Just research. Trying to make some sense of it."

Snape nodded, and put the book back where it had been before turning to face her.

She looked much the same, but there was a faded quality to her now. As though she had been working too much and sleeping too little.

_'Which,' Snape reminded himself, 'is probably the case.'_

She looked up at him, and like she had seven years ago, kissed him.

She turned, and walked into her bedroom. He followed in silence, and closed the door.

~*~

When she woke up, he was gone. There was nothing to mark that he had ever been there, except a slight dent in the pillow. Even though she was certain she hadn't expected him to stay till morning, nor wanted him to, she felt a vague, aching sense of loss, and stayed curled up in bed for the remainder of the day.

She was cooking dinner the next evening when she realised she couldn't lift up a dish because her hands were shaking too much. It didn't matter, she told herself, again and again, it was nothing. Just nerves. Too little sleep, too much coffee.

But when the bottle of wine slipped through her fingers and shattered, she couldn't make sense of it.

~*~*~*~


	3. Third

**Disclaimer:** Characters and universe is J.K. Rowling's, and the song, _Fly Away, is by Poe._

~*~*~*~

_  
It makes sense that it should feel this way,  
That you slowly fade and yet still remain,_

_As if to say_

_Everything matters in such an invisible way.  
As if to say_

_It's okay,  
Fly...away._

~*~

It was a very small ceremony, performed under a washed-out blue sky, just outside of Hogsmeade. Dumbledore, still refusing to be sensible and die like most normal wizards, presided. Snape was more than a little alarmed to note that neither Potter nor Weasley, the two people he had most expected to be there, were absent.

He scowled darkly, when Dumbledore gently tossed a handful of dirt onto the coffin lid. It was a very Muggle ceremony – for her parents, Snape supposed. They stood silently, leaning on each other for support, but neither had that shocked, disbelieving look he expected to see.

They had buried their daughter a long time ago. This was just a more formal service.

The discreet pile of rich, dark earth was magically returned to the hole where it belonged, the slight protrusion of the packed dirt the only indication anything was different. After that, the people began to wander, in twos and threes, down the hill towards the town, McGonagall and Dumbledore flanking the Grangers. An honour guard, of sorts, Snape thought, that came too little, too late. He waited, till the stragglers had disapparated or wandered back to Hogsmeade, to The Three Broomsticks.

He walked past the newly turned earth towards the rest of the plots. He remembered when Albus had told him of Hermione's death.

~*~

"Bury her with the rest of the fallen," Snape said bluntly. Dumbledore looked at him for a moment without understanding.

"Why?"

"Because she told me after the battle that she would come back to Hogwarts one day, if only to see the graves."

The old Headmaster had nodded and sipped his tea.

"She killed herself, didn't she?"

Dumbledore looked up, startled. Snape smiled humourlessly.

"Yes."

"With magic?"

The older wizard stared quietly at the younger man for a moment. "No. She cut her wrists."

Snape nodded and clasped his hand behind his back, clenching his fingers together till his knuckles turned white.

~*~

So now, here she was. On a small hill, under a tree. Snape had pointed to the spot wordlessly when he and Dumbledore came to the field the day after the heard the news. Her parents had been surprisingly unconcerned with what was to be done with the body – they probably were surprised to find out that their daughter had been missing not only from them but also from her Wizarding friends.

Snape walked past the older graves, pausing in front of a few – Rubeus Hagrid, Filius Flitwick, Coronis Sinistra, Remus Lupin. He walked past every plot, paying his silent respects, before returning to the newest.

"You've come back, and seen the graves," he said quietly. "And me. You said that you'd want to see me as well."

He paused, as though waiting for a response.

"You found your answer, I suppose. I think you half-expected it – you seemed too thin, too tired, when we met. You knew it was coming, and how it would end." He looked up from the simple headstone, and squinted up at the sky. "I still waited for you to come back."

He turned on his heel, and stalked down the hill towards the town.

~*~

Snape sat in front of his fireplace, a pile of ratty notebooks on the reading table beside him and a similar one in his hands. He turned the last page, covered in a neat, cramped hand, and read quickly. Once finished, the book was closed and then tossed casually into the fire.

This continued, the only change occurring when he retrieved a bottle of whiskey and a glass. As he read the final books, the level of liquor in the bottle rapidly decreased, and the glass was eventually forgotten.

Finally, the last journal had been tossed into the fire, and the whiskey was gone.

He could hear her whispering in his ear now, and feel her standing behind him. He was quite aware that if he turned around, or strained to hear her words, she would vanish.

He remembered that first evening, long after he had followed her back to her Head Girl suite, when she had told him she would be leaving. He had wondered if she was still sane. He wondered the same about himself now.

As he staggered into his bedroom, and fell into the comforting warmth of unconsciousness, he was certain she was there, lying beside him.

~*~*~*~


End file.
